Mendingthesacredhoop.com

The Story of The Unit Simulacrum and Whole PI

Introduction  -  Continued

 

Alright, you want to know more about PI, and so you want to get right to it. But you are not ready yet. You have not yet been sufficiently prepared. You have not learned the new construct, and what it means. You must learn about the Unit Simulacrum before you can learn how it leads to new knowledge about PI, the nature of the three dimensions, and the seen and unseen mass that makes up our world. So, the starting point is: What is a simulacrum?

I first learned what a simulacrum was from the book by Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulation’. Credit for the impetus to read this book goes to the Wachowski Brothers, Andy and Larry, makers of the movie “The Matrix”. This requires a little background. I had seen and loved all three of the Matrix movies. When I first saw The Matrix, I knew that it was much more than a common movie. I knew that it was one of those pivotal cultural events that has an influence on the history of man. I knew that it was the perfect metaphor. I didn’t yet know exactly what it was the perfect metaphor for, but I knew that it was a movie that could lead one to a higher level of knowledge. So, being a fan, I watched the extended interviews with the stars that were included in the extended DVD version of the movie. I learned that the Wachowski Brothers, who wrote and co-directed the film, required each of the four lead actors, Neo (Keanu Reeves), Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) to read three books. These were: 1) Simulacrum and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard, 2) Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World, by Kevin Kelly, and 3) Illusions, The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach, who also wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The brothers wanted the actors to read these books to help them understand what the brothers were trying to say in the movie. Well, being a fan, I wanted to understand what they were trying to say, so I ordered the three books from amazon.com. The book Illusions was quite interesting, entertaining, and a great, quick read. The book Simulacrum and Simulation is such dense prose, reading it is like cutting through a dense jungle with a butter knife. Each page must be read and re-read to get the intended meaning. I must admit that I haven’t finished it yet. But I did read and learn about the ‘desert of the real’, as mentioned in the movie, and I learned what a simulacrum is. According to that book, a simulacrum is a construct so complete and thorough in its reproduction of a data set that it renders the original data set on which it is based obsolete. Only after having read and understood this concept could I have realized that The Bottom Up Solution was a simulacrum, and then see the pattern behind it to give the Unit Simulacrum. There is a time early in The Matrix when Neo is awakened by his computer. He has a brief conversation with a mysterious hacker (Trinity), and then some ‘business associates’ come by to pick up some illegal software (or holographic program?). Neo keeps his pirated software stashed in a book, which is none other than ‘Simulacrum and Simulation’. Then, Neo follows the white rabbit, and starts to learn how far down the rabbit hole goes. Reading this book will hopefully show you the rabbit hole, and let you start to see how far down it goes.

But I get ahead of myself. I need to go back to the beginning, give you some background on me and my work, and let you know a little about me. That way, you can judge for yourself whether what happened to me was fair and proper, or whether you feel that I got the shaft. But hopefully, you and I will both learn that no matter what happened, it is exactly what was supposed to happen. The way that it happened is the perfect metaphor. I brought new knowledge that was definitely not accepted or appreciated. Hopefully, others will see the truth in what I have to say, and will take this knowledge and use it as a tool for greater discoveries.

One of the first things people learn about me is that I am enthusiastic and am an eternal optimist. I believe in propagating good things in the Universe. I have feet of clay and have done some darn foolish things, but I have tried to do no harm to any person. The poem Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant that I learned in junior high school teaches a good lesson: “So live, that when thy summons comes to join the innumerable caravan, which moves to that mysterious realm, where each shall take his chamber in the silent halls of death, thou go not, like a quarry slave at night, scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams.”

I have always been a pretty smart kid. I got mostly A’s in high school, until the end, and I ended up being ranked 70 out of 500 in my high school class, which is in the top 14%. I was, though, ‘precocious’. I coined the phrase as a young man that ‘a smart alek turns into a wise man’. I had close to straight A’s in high school, until the last semester, when I got an ‘F’ in band, of all things, for getting in trouble with alcohol on a band outing. It was in high school that I first got interested in chemistry. My thanks go to my chemistry teacher Mr. Sweat, who was a short, thin, young-looking guy with dark hair and a dark beard and mustache. I never realized it until now, but he looked like some kind of chemistry elf. He was highly energetic and waved his hands wildly, acting like an electron moving around the central core of the nucleus of an atom (of course quantum mechanical approaches to chemistry were not routinely taught in high school then). Now we know that any such physical description of the cosmic dance of subatomic particles should be unlearned. The book “The Dancing Wu Li Masters: an overview of the new physics” gives a good layman’s introduction to Feynman diagrams that describe the cosmic dance of subatomic particles. Another important thing that book and others do is to start to shake your certainly in the solidity of our reality. This process of loosening our insistence that things are as they appear is a necessary prerequisite to seeing things from ‘outside the box’. The task of breaking our insistence that things are as they appear is also done by the series of books by Carlos Castaneda, which are listed as non-fiction, but which many feel are fiction. Regardless of their status, they nevertheless do provide plenty of precedent for incredible things that could conceivably be done, if one were at the right level of perception. Castaneda’s books were all about perception. They teach that you should learn to examine and question your own perception.

One way to examine our group perception is to investigate the history of the numbers and principles that make up our common reality. Numbers and principles that lie at the core of our group perception have been discussed in recent books on the history and nature of the concepts of zero and one (there is a good PBS video called The Story of 1), and similarly, several good books on PI have also recently come out. These sources make us realize that the concepts we take for granted are not as old as we may think they are.

Another great source for stories that help to tear down our insistence that things are only as they appear is the body of stories of the native American holy men. A good starting point is the seminal text by John Niehardt, Black Elk Speaks, which describes the life and times of Nicholas Black Elk, a holy man of the Lakota people (also called the Sioux). The stories of Fools Crow (in Fools Crow), as told by Thomas Mails, and of Archie ‘Fire’ Lame Deer (in Gift of Power – The Life and Teachings of a Lakota Medicine Man) and John ‘Fire’ Lame Deer (in Lame Deer – Seeker of Visions), as told by Richard Erdoes, also serve to push a person off one’s ‘comfort spot’. Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, has been able to move through those people to produce tangible results in the lives of those they serve. It has been my impression that native Americans never fully bought into the white man’s philosophy that science can be used to explain everything, and that nothing exists unless it can be proved by science. The native Americans lived within the sacred hoop, in balance and harmony with nature. Of course, wasichus did our best to destroy the native belief system and to acculturate native Americans to our belief system. For many native Americans, the sacred hoop has been broken.

But science and the sacred do not have to be at cross purposes. Roger Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Leonard Euler, John Dalton, Michael Farraday, James Joule, Lord Kelvin, James Clerk Maxwell, George Washington Carver and others are included in the book ‘Scientists of Faith’. These and other great scientists of our past have tried to understand more about the world around us by using the tool of science. They have used science for nothing less than to try to gain insight into the mind of God and the creation in which we find ourselves. Einstein is quoted to have said: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” In The Story of 1, there is a description of the discovery of the binary system in the 1600s by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). He was quoted as saying “It is true that as the empty voids and dismal wilderness belong to zero, so the Spirit of God and His Light belong to the all-powerful One.”

It may yet be possible to see the unity of form that moves through our reality, and to come to an understanding of the pattern behind the construct. By seeing that pattern in the natural world, we may be able to understand more about the nature of our reality. We may be able to come to see the sacred through science, and to begin to Mend the Sacred Hoop.

 

References :

Byrdwell.com